C.S. Lewis and Beyond

There is no sense in talking of ‘becoming better’ if better means simply ‘what we are becoming; - it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as ‘the place you have reached.’ -CS Lewis, Evil and God

I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself and quite apart from my character. I might detest something which I have done. Nevertheless, I do not cease to love myself. -CS Lewis, Answers to Questions on Christianity

To a mind which did not share our emotions, and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument from size would be sheerly meaningless. -CS Lewis, Dogma and the Universe

The master can correct a boy’s sums because they are blunders in arithmetic - in the same arithmetic which he does and does better. -CS Lewis, Evil and God

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. -CS Lewis, “Myth Became Fact”

To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. -CS Lewis, Essay: On Forgiveness

A convict has a number instead of a name. That is the collective idea carried to its extreme. But a man in his own house may also lose his name, because he is called simply “Father.” That is membership in a body. The loss of the name in both cases reminds us that there are two opposite ways of departing from isolation. -CS Lewis, Membership

Many theologians and some scientists are ready now to proclaim that the nineteenth century ‘conflict between science and religion’ is over and done with. But even if this is true, it is a truth known only to real theologians and real scientists - that is, to a few highly educated men. To the man in the street the conflict is still perfectly real, and in his mind it takes a form which the learned hardly dream of. -CS Lewis, “Horrid Red Things”

You can not *study* Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? -CS Lewis, “Myth Became Fact”

My own idea is that modern industry is a radically hopeless system. You can improve wages, hours, conditions, etc., but all that doesn’t cure the deepest trouble: i.e. that numbers of people are kept all their lives doing dull repetition work which gives no full play to their faculties. -CS Lewis, Answers to Questions on Christianity

I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, WHATEVER character actual existence may have. Perhaps a finite and contingent creature - a creature that might not have existed - will always find it hard to acquiesce in the brute fact that it is, here and now, attached to an actual order of things. -CS Lewis, Dogma and the Universe

@JosephBenJ2 So in that way, a mere name of a parent is a lesser thing. "Dad" or "Mom" is a stronger, more-true term for a child/parent relationship. "Pete" or "Sally" is the lesser, not the greater.

@JosephBenJ2 Knowing their names is useful. But there is no more important relationship than simply parent and child, and there the "individualism" falls away in a sense. Or perhaps, becomes even deeper. For MY FATHER is distinctly mine. But also, Father. In a sense the are inseparable.

The modern notion that children should call their parents by their [first] names is so perverse. For this is an effort to ignore the difference in kind which makes for real organic unity. They are trying to inoculate the child with the preposterous view that one’s mother is simply a fellow citizen like anyone else, to make it ignorant of what all men know and insensible to what all men feel. They are trying to drag the featureless repetitions of the collective into the fuller and more concrete world of the family. -CS Lewis, Membership

In reality, cruelty does not come from desiring evil as such, but from perverted sexuality, inordinate resentment, or lawless ambition and avarice. That is precisely why it can be judged and condemned from the standpoint of innocent sexuality, righteous anger, and ordinate acquisitiveness. -CS Lewis, Evil and God

Even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent of guilt which is left over. -CS Lewis, Essay: On Forgiveness

Really, we are hard to please. We treat God as the police treat a man when he is arrested; whatever He does will be used in evidence against Him. -CS Lewis, Dogma and the Universe

If a taste for cruelty and a taste for kindness were equally ultimate and basic, by what common standard could one reprove the other? -CS Lewis, Evil and God

“It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison.” -CS Lewis, The Great Divorce

If crimes are diseases, why should diseases be treated differently from crimes? And who but the experts can define disease? One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory 'cure'? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, 'What have I done to deserve this?' The Straightener will reply: 'But, my dear fellow, no one's blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We're healing you.' -CS Lewis, “Is Progress Possible?”

For He claims all, because He is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There is no bargaining with Him. -CS Lewis, A Slip of the Tongue